Note 17.1 — Chapter I · Inaugural Lecture.

The various questions suggested by this predominance of goddess-worship are fascinating and subtle. The sociological one—how far it is to be connected with a system of counting descent through the female, with a matrilinear society—I have partly discussed elsewhere.17.1 I may later be able to enter on the question that is of more interest for the psychology of religion—the effect of such worships on the religious sentiment. Here I can merely point to the phenomenon as a natural and logical product of the principle of anthropomorphism, but would call attention to the fact that in the East it sometimes developed into a form that, from the anthropomorphic point of view, must be called morbid and subversive of this principle; for the rivalry of divine sex was here and there solved by the fusion of the two natures in the divinity, and we find a bisexual type—a male Astarte, a bearded Ishtar.17.2 The healthy-minded anthropomorphism of the Hellene rejects this Oriental extravagance.